Pet bills offer more bark than bite

Lawmakers dogged by voters offer proposals destined to go nowhere

Published 11:19 pm, Wednesday, May 2, 2012

ALBANY — It's been 403 years since Henry Hudson sailed into New York harbor and 225 since the state's first constitution was adopted, but some lawmakers think New York needs an official state dog.

Actually, there are competing proposals — two bills out of roughly 12,000 that will be considered over the current two-year legislative session — to crown the New York-iest canine.

A measure by Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg would designate the German shepherd as the Empire State's official hound. The Long Island Democrat said he introduced the bill after a woman he met at a kennel convention asked him to.

More Information

Another bill by Assemblyman Micah Kellner, would designate dogs rescued by animal shelters — whatever their breed, pure or mutt — as the state dog.

"This is not a goof bill. This isn't the state soil," said Kellner, D-Manhattan. "My bill actually promotes the idea of rescuing animals, educates our children about rescuing animals and saves localities money."

Wait, wait — "state soil"? Sure enough, there's a bill by Assemblywoman Annie Rabbitt, R-Orange County, to designate black dirt as the state soil. It has not moved in the legislative process.

Let's look beyond dirt and dogs.

Somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 pieces of legislation will be acted upon in the Assembly, according to chamber spokesman Mike Whyland. All will pass: There are 49 Republicans in the chamber and 100 Democrats, who control which bills come to the floor. No bill has failed in the Assembly since at least 2004; since 2005, 13 bills have failed on the floor of the state Senate.

This year, 1,235 bills have been introduced there, and 372 have passed, according to Scott Reif, a spokesman for Senate Republicans. It costs just under $200 million to fund the Legislature.

Legislators often introduce measures they know have no chance of passing, in some cases openly admitting, as Weisenberg did, that they were simply trying to make a point by its introduction.

But what about meaty issues — imposing legislative term limits, say, or establishing an independent commission to draw legislative districts — that are introduced year after year but never come up for a vote?

This is especially a problem for the chamber's Republicans like Assemblyman Mark Johns, a freshman from suburban Rochester. He has a bill that would give each member the chance to have one single bill brought for an up-or-down floor vote — and he doesn't care if legislation passes or fails.

"You get to pinch hit once every two seasons," he said. "We do vote on a lot of nonsense. But I was elected to usher in real reform, and if we did this, people would start talking about it."

If — and we wish we could print "if" in a bigger type size — the bill were to pass, what would members advance? Would there be votes on the state dog?

Some legislation seems destined to percolate as idea but not law. Many bills of this type can be changed before they are even introduced.

Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, for example, recently backed away from a provision to ban testicular implants for dogs — called "neuticles" — after she was razzed by colleagues for a bill she was drafting to ban "non-medical cosmetic surgery" for dogs and cats.

The final form of the bill would ban tattoos, piercings and tummy tucks.

"It's just unnecessary," the Staten Island Republican said. "To put a dog through that amounts to a form of animal cruelty."